Educator urges female students to make waves

September 07, 2005|By Alison Neumer Lara, Tribune staff reporter

Dartmouth College started admitting women in 1972, but that didn't mean they were welcome.

At least that's the impression Gina Barreca had as she navigated between blatantly sexist professors and resentful male students in the mid-'70s. Banners reading "Better dead than co-ed" aren't exactly warm and fuzzy, nor are drunk frat boys who don't believe you attend the same school.

Over four years at an elite school in remote New Hampshire, smack in the middle of the women's movement, Barreca learned to do what any sassy smartypants would: challenge stale ideas and press buttons. Only later, after she had looked past the tofu and earth shoes, did she claim her new identity as a feminist. "A good education can be subversive," she writes in her recent book on the experience, "Babes in Boyland: A Personal History of Co-Education in the Ivy League" (University Press of New England). "I suspect, therefore, that only a very good education could have prepared me to be a troublemaker."

Women like Barreca fought for their place at newly co-ed colleges, so they're troubled by current women students who don't identify as feminists and aren't pushing the envelope.

"Girls are still taught that they have to please," says Barreca, who defines personal power as just the opposite--the ability not to have to please or to seek approval. These days the self-described humorist is still doing her best to raise eyebrows as a professor of literature and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.

"I know a lot of young women whose voices go up at the end of their sentences. I can't believe there are still girls who put on strappy platform shoes to walk across campus."

But, some students argue, isn't that behavior by choice?

"It's not as obvious who is a feminist anymore," says Alaine Kalder, a junior at University of Illinois at Chicago. "It's not about what you wear or what music you listen to."

Absolutely, Barreca agrees, recalling the day a strapping young guy waltzed into her classroom sporting a T-shirt that declared, "This is what a feminist looks like." But it's not common to see men--or women--demonstrate that view unprovoked, she says. Feminist is still a dirty word.

One reason could be that female students grew up assuming rights and beliefs that the feminist movement fought to establish, says Judith Roy, a professor of women's studies at Century College and president of the National Women's Studies Association.

"I do see women becoming much more relaxed, more confident about sexuality, body image and taking for granted--in a good way--that they can follow whatever career path they want," Roy said.

"The older generation is getting impatient improperly because we're not remembering what motivated [the women's movement]. It was almost in the air."

Still, Barreca insists, women students need to press ahead on a personal, as well as professional, level because sex and gender remain prominent issues on campus.

"I see girls informed by a sense of trepidation," she says. "Take an astronomy class. Learn to play ice hockey. Do something out of character because you don't know your character yet."